Gretzky NHL

September 6,2005 - To the sports gamer, PSP launch is rather unusual. Sure, there are plenty of sports simulation titles to choose from, but this time, that comes no thanks to usual suspects EA Sports and 2K Games. A couple of Baseball games are coming from the big two sports developers in the next month or two, and the absence of simulation Football...well, we know the reason behind that (even though it's unusual for EA to not have a Madden game ready in time for a system launch). That leaves us with Basketball and Hockey, both of which only get one simulation each for the PSP launch; 989 Sports has its day in the spotlight.

Here, we'll be talking about 989's Hockey contribution to the PSP launch, Gretzky NHL. Despite not having a year attached to the name this time, this is basically a PSP port of last year's Gretzky NHL 2005 for the PlayStation2, but unfortunately, its insistence on abiding by its PS2 counterpart causes more detriment than benefit.

When you first start the game up, you will be setting up a profile for yourself, which even includes naming your favorite NHL franchise (for presetting purposes). It initially looks like it's leading up to a pretty deep Hockey experience in the vein of Sega's ESPN NHL 2K5, but that's not really the case. To be sure, once you get playing, you'll find that the game engine is extremely fast-paced and frantic, which might work well for the arcade game that Gretzky is at heart, but doesn't fit in well at all with the simulation elements that were pretty-much forced in by 989 Sports. In fact, that tends to be the recurring theme with Gretzky NHL; arcade Hockey making a desperate, borderline-pathetic attempt to be a simulation. The fact that the specific simulation it is attempting to be is one of the worst ones going right now doesn't help matters.

Once you start playing, you're greeted by the same modes you usually find in Hockey games, save for one noteworthy exception; a Franchise mode. One of the apparent drawbacks to having to get a Hockey game up and ready for PSP launch was that, functionally-speaking, it could only perform up to par with last console generation's games of the same genre. In fact, a lot of things in Gretzky NHL will make you feel like it's 1998 again, ranging from the season mode and transaction system therein, to the very limited nature of the gameplay (aside from a very well-defined manual shot aim mechanic) and aesthetics.

Like other sports games of this nature, there are plenty of unlockables. Accumulating the points with which to buy them can involve simple tasks like scoring your first goal or winning your first game, to not-so-simple objectives that usually involve hitting certain NHL records. These include hitting the 446 team goals mark, racking up 57 team wins in a single season, pulling down a season Win% of .744, and so on. If it wasn't bad enough that 989's trademark mediocre gameplay just isn't entertaining enough in general to keep someone playing long enough to score their hundredth goal, let alone their 446th, a lot of the unlockables are rather unnecessary, including third jerseys that should be available from the start. There are a handful of cool inclusions, such as classic versions of Wayne Gretzky from throughout his illustrious pro career that can be injected into the roster of your team of choice. Still, there's just not enough here to justify bothering with the game's usually-lofty demands, and does nothing to improve an otherwise-lackluster arcade Hockey game stuck in a simulation's body.

To make matters worse, the last-gen theme spills over to the graphics. This was more of an accident than anything, since 989 was hellbent from the start on forcing last year's PS2 game onto the PSP in painfully accurate form, at gunpoint if need be. Although there are very few reasons to complain about the player models and overall detailing, they create a torrent of reasons to complain about the framerate. It's not quite as bad as, say, NHL 2000 on the PlayStation (which did well to run at 10 FPS when there wasn't much action going on), but it's still more than enough to interfere with any flow the gameplay might have potentially had. During the best of times, Gretzky plays like a solid enough game with some framerate issues interfering, but the worst-case scenario has you chasing the puck through total chaos in your own end, with a circumstantial goal resulting only because the game reached such unplayable conditions that you had no way of adequately defending the net. Looking at other sports games like World Tour Soccer (22 players, a much larger area, and smooth visuals all the way) and NBA - which is easily the best-looking PSP game yet, it's really hard to understand why Gretzky NHL came out so poorly, especially to such a degree that the graphics had an extreme detrimental effect on the gameplay.

Thankfully, the audio gives Gretzky NHL some measure of aesthetic redemption. Despite the absence of any play-by-play or color commentary other than the very rare speech of the PA announcer, the sound effects are among the best we've ever heard from a Hockey game. The sound of skates gliding around on the ice, the clack of a tape-to-tape pass connecting, and the boom of one of Rob Blake's howitzers from the point make up some of the most authentic on-ice audio to date for a Hockey video game, and hopefully 989 stays the course in that department while improving other aspects of the game for future installments.

Make no mistake, though; Gretzky NHL is not the simulation 989 has been trying to make from the time the Faceoff series kicked off on the PlayStation. In a sense, Gretzky NHL represents a “perfect world� for the league. There's a lot of open ice, no clutching or grabbing, and plenty of room in which to shoot the puck. Furthermore, Gretzky is not devoid of redeeming features, and actually plays a decent game of arcade Hockey when the settings are right. Still, those looking for a legitimate substitute for the usual offerings of EA and Take-Two on the PSP launch won't find one here. Gretzky NHL ultimately ends up a jack of all trades, bringing the graphical detail of this generation's Hockey sims (at the cost of extreme frame loss), the options of last gen's, and the gameplay of the 16-bit era. Sadly, 989's kicking-and-screaming refusal to just let their game wear its natural old-school colors undermined the entire package, turning a potentially great game of arcade Hockey into a low-quality wannabe simulation that's hard to recommend to anyone but the most hardcore of Hockey fans.

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